SOURCE: Connor, Steven. “‘What? Where?’ Presence and Repetition in Beckett's Theatre.” In Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis, pp. 1-19. New York, N.Y.: St Martin's Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Connor analyzes the voices, sounds, silences, and use of repetition in Beckett's plays. Connor contends that without being able to depend on physicality, the sounds coupled with the repetitions create a “space” for the audience's inspection.]

Beckett's turn to the theatre has often been represented as the expression of a longing for an art of visibility and tangibility as a relief from the epistemological disintegrations which Beckett described in his interview with Israel Schenker in 1956—‘no “I,” no “have,” no “being.” No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There's no way to go on.’¹ Michael Robinson, for example, sees the theatre as ‘the only direction in which a development was possible’, since the theatre ‘promises a firmer reality than a subjective monologue written and read in isolation; perhaps on the stage the reality behind the words may be revealed by the action which often contradicts that literal meaning’.² Beckett himself has testified to the sense of relief that he gets from working in drama:

Theater ist für mich zunächst eine Erholung von der Arbeit am Roman. Man hat es mit einem bestimmten Raum zu tun und mit Menschen in diesem Raum.³

Perhaps the most emphatic statement of this view of Beckett's turn to the theatre is that offered by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Writing early in Beckett's dramatic career, he stressed the sense of sheer presence which is given by Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, deprived as they apparently are of all the conventional dramatic supports of script, plot or properties. Because they have nothing to rely on, they are also free, for they have nothing to repeat; everything is happening for the first and last time. For Robbe-Grillet, Beckett's theatre embodies the Heideggerian apprehension of Dasein, of primordial being-there; Vladimir and Estragon are ‘irremediably present’.⁴

Other writers have elaborated or modified this theme by stressing the self-reflexiveness of the plays. William Worthen argues that Beckett ‘literalizes’ the plight of his characters in the visibly straitened conditions in which his actors are required to work, so that a piece like Play ‘dramatizes the essential dynamics of stage performance’.⁵ Sidney Homan argues in a similar way for self-reflection as a guarantee of presence. The plays turn in on themselves, he argues, to join playwright, play and audience in a mutually-mirroring autonomy. The plays therefore no longer require reference to a pre-existing world, or the addition of any commentary to elucidate meanings which are hidden or allegorically elsewhere; the plays are simply what they are, in an elementary performing present, without before or after, the action ‘complete, pure, itself—and immediately experienced by the audience’.⁶ Beckett's occasional remarks about his plays have encouraged this view of their fundamental simplicity. Writing to Alan Schneider about Endgame, Beckett explained his insistence on ‘the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation … Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that's all I can manage, more than I could.’⁷

In many ways, this view of Beckett's turn to the theatre reproduces conventional views about theatre itself and its relation to the other arts, and, most notably, the opposition between the ‘living’ art of the theatre and the dead or abstract experience of private reading. If we merely imagine characters and events in written texts, it is often said, then in the theatre, and in other visual media, we ‘actually see’ those characters and events, ‘actually hear’ their voices. If the dramatic performance must always be secondary to the authorial text which it repeats, then there has been a desire among many modern commentators to assert, against this, the primacy of the performance over the text. One of the most representative and influential of these is Antonin Artaud. Throughout his essays of the 1930s, Artaud argues for a non-repetitive theatre, one which is not slavishly obedient to the written texts which precede and control it but instead speaks its own, intrinsically theatrical language of mime, gesture, dance, music, light, space and scene. This escape from the script is an escape from the compulsion to repeat. The spectator of the drama will no longer be forced to try to read the performance back into its original script, since what he or she beholds will be both text and performance; and closing the gap between text and performance will also close the gap between meaning and interpretation for the spectator. In such a theatre, there is no need, or even possibility of a confirming ‘elsewhere’: the theatre begins and ends with itself:

We might say the subjects presented begin on stage. They have reached such a point of objective materialisation we could not imagine them, however much one [sic] might try, outside this compact panorama, the enclosed, confined world of the stage.⁸

Artaud's formulation resembles the kind of thing that is often said of Beckett's plays, especially his late plays. The claim for self-reflexive unity is found, for example, in Ruby Cohn's arguments for the increasing ‘theatereality’ of Beckett's plays, by which she means the increasing convergence of the space that the plays represent with the actual theatre space in which they are performed, and in Enoch Brater's claims for the identity established between word and image in Rockaby, in which, he says ‘a verbal metaphor becomes concrete and palpable. In a word it has become real.’⁹

If, in some ways, Beckett's theatre is aptly described as a theatre of presence, or, in Artaud's terms, a theatre freed from repetition, then there are also important ways in which his work seems to undermine not only the particular claims of individual critics, but the more general cultural claims upon which they often rest and from which they derive their authority. I think it is no accident that Beckett's international fame came first of all as a playwright and not as a novelist, for it has been the prevailing critical and cultural consensus about the theatre and its strengths and capacities which has allowed his work to be absorbed and rewritten as a humanist theatre of presence, a theatre which directly and powerfully embodies real, and universal human predicaments. In various ways, and particularly in the intricate play of its different repetitions, Beckett's theatre makes this critical representation seem inadequate, and asks questions of common conceptions about the theatre as a whole.

VOICE AND WRITING

The drama's claim to embody a ‘metaphysics of presence’ rests largely upon two other claims: that it represents human beings with the actual bodies of other human beings, and that it represents spoken words with words spoken by those actual human beings. The relationship between these claims is an intimate and necessary one. In the case of Beckett's theatre, there is a particular potency in the promise of the audible voice, given the point which seems to have been reached in The Unnamable: though the speaker is surrounded and penetrated by voices, murmuring and babbling, he cannot be sure if any of those voices are his own, cannot even be sure of the existence of the voices. For Beckett, the opportunity that theatre offers for full and unambiguous speech was clearly not to be resisted. But this opportunity is also a drawback. For if one of the drives behind Beckett's work is to speak the self, to ‘say I’, then his work is also driven by the desire to retract, efface, or otherwise cancel out speech, to speak in order to fall silent. This must provoke the question of how an art of effacement can work with the dominating palpability of ‘living’ speech in the drama.

One of the important ways in which this is attempted is by a return to the repetitive and auto-citational devices of the fiction. The refrains which echo through Waiting for Godot and Endgame work against the sense of immediate utterance. As we hear the formulaic interchanges being repeated, we become aware that, faced with the giddy nothingness of being on stage and having nothing to say, Vladimir and Estragon have to fall back on what they have said before. They quote themselves, or, it might perhaps be felt, their language begins to quote them, in what comes to seem like a self-erasure.

But Beckett's later theatre goes further than this in interrogating the opposition of speech and writing. This happens most strikingly as a result of the introduction on to the stage, the place of ‘living’ speech, of the ‘dead’ language of mechanical reproduction. By doing this, Beckett transgresses the opposition between the repeatable and the non-repeatable which conventionally underlies the opposition between writing and speech. Writing is ‘dead’ because it is language that has been separated from its originating body and receiving context, to allow it to be reused in different contexts. Only in writing is it possible to say ‘I am dead’.

But in the use of the tape-recorder in Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett shows us a language which is not exactly speech or writing. Though the recording retains everything that seems living about the voice, its tone, rhythms, pitch and emphasis, the mere fact that it is possible to retain this much is what makes certain the loss of continuity between the voice and its context. Where the younger Krapp can talk expertly about his mother's ‘viduity’, the older Krapp no longer remembers what the word means, just as he cannot remember the details set down in the ledger about the ‘black ball’ or the ‘memorable equinox’. In fact the ledger that Krapp consults forms an interesting counterpart to the spoken voice that he hears on the tape. The effect for the viewer of seeing Krapp as puzzled by the voice as by the written redaction of what the voice has to say, though able in both cases to stop and go over the material again, is to run together the two forms of language and to highlight the ways in which recorded speech resembles writing.

The same conflation is suggested by other parallels. Beckett, as usual in his fiction and drama, insists on the material facts involved in the process of reading, stressing the weight and inaccessibility of the ledger, the difficulty Krapp has in reading the entries with his failing eyesight and, especially, the necessity of breaking off reading to turn the page—‘Farewell to—[he turns page]—love.’¹⁰ The effect of bathos is intensified by the splitting of the word in the French version—‘Adieu à l'a … (il tourne la page) … mour’—with the obvious hint that it gives of love turning to death.¹¹ But Beckett exploits the simple physical fact of the turning of the page as well. Written language allows—one might almost say necessitates—gaps and interruptions, for its unchanging material form means that it can be broken off and resumed at the same point. The immediacy of speech, on the other hand, is directly related to its volatility, and speech cannot be suspended in this way, without being lost for ever. In Krapp's Last Tape, the possibility of introducing gaps is evident both in the written ledger and the spoken tape, this possibility in both cases being a function of iterability. The awareness of the function of gaps is likely to induce a sense of other parallels between speech and writing. The hesitations in the younger Krapp's voice, for instance, which punctuate his confidently continuous dialogue with moments of indecisive silence, open up possibilities of alteration or difference. So Krapp's ‘farewell to—[he turns page]—love’ is matched by the voice on the tape saying ‘I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to … [hesitates] … me’ (CDW, [Complete Dramatic Works] 217). Such a hesitation functions as an indicator of authentic speech at the same time as it reminds us of the gaps typical of writing; the younger Krapp's hesitations are like the moments when the older Krapp winds back and pauses before resuming. On a couple of occasions, the listener's interpolations of silence or commentary are run together, or counterpointed with those of the speaker on the tape:

Ah well … [Pause.] These old P.M.s are gruesome, but I often find them—[KRAPP switches off, broods, switches on.]—a help before embarking on a new … [hesitates] … retrospect.

(CDW, 218)

And sometimes the older and younger Krapp collude more closely in listening and responding to the words as they are being spoken:

The voice! Jesus! And the aspirations! [Brief laugh in which KRAPP joins.] And the resolutions! [Brief laugh in which KRAPP joins.] To drink less in particular. [Brief laugh of KRAPP alone.]

(CDW, 218)

Here older and younger Krapp both break up the continuity of the utterance with derisive commentary upon it. The fact that the older Krapp adds a layer of disillusion only emphasises the citational nature of the original utterance, in which the middle-aged Krapp is in turn appropriating the recorded words of his younger self in order to deride them.

Though Krapp's spoken journal into the tape-recorder may sound spontaneous, it is not. The voice and style of the younger Krapp suggest speech under the particular stress that the awareness of a recording brings with it, speech darkened by the threatening shadow of repeatability. This may account for the nervous hesitations in his speech; it is as though the threat of repetition redoubles itself by inducing moments of self-critical review at the moment of vocal delivery. As a performance, the younger Krapp's report shows the influence of another more obvious kind of writing, as well: the notes jotted down on an envelope from which he may be reading or improvising. The older Krapp seems to have retained this habit—in fact, when we first hear about the envelope from the younger Krapp and connect it with the envelope that the older Krapp has produced at the beginning of the play, we might even wonder for a moment whether it isn't the same envelope. Certainly the older Krapp gets little assistance from his notes, for he soon crumples up the envelope and resorts to improvised speech. The sense of vulnerability which this engenders may remind us of Vladimir and Estragon, who seem similarly scriptless. Like Vladimir and Estragon, the older Krapp cannot keep up the flow of speech, without resorting to repetition, the repetition of the delicious word ‘spool’, the repetition of his song, the allusive repetitions in the memories of Christmas and Sunday mornings on Croghan, and, finally, the repetition of the tape in place of his own words. But if Krapp resembles Vladimir, Estragon, Hamm and Clov, in having to produce unscripted language for an audience, then his predicament differs from theirs, too. His words are being recorded and so are marked in advance with the sign of writing and destined to enter into the condition of iterability.

The envelope is indeed a fit emblem for this kind of writing. Krapp's recordings are intended to provide a firm and unambiguous record of a moment of time, but instead show how every utterance can be taken up or enveloped by some other occasion, some other context of understanding. Krapp's recorded life then comes to seem less like a logically continuous series of discrete utterances, each fixed firmly in its intentional context, than a web of mutually-enveloping self-quotations, each endlessly displaced from its originating moment.

In all these ways, Krapp's Last Tape moves to dissolve or undermine the dramatic qualities most commonly associated with speech—immediacy, originality and continuity. In doing this, it transforms the theatre from a place of living speech to a place of writing, a place where it becomes possible—and maybe even unavoidable—to say ‘I am dead’. This represents more than a simple inversion of the priority of speech over writing. As with Derrida's work, the interrogation of the speech/writing opposition in Beckett's theatre compels the sense that the stable difference between speech and writing is in fact repeated as an unstable difference within speech and writing. Derrida argues that speech itself is both living and dead, unique and repeatable. Intrinsic to the structure of every sign, spoken or otherwise, is the possibility that it allows of being quoted or repeated in some other context. This ‘possibility of extraction and of citational grafting’ means that any sign ‘can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion’.¹²

Beckett's later plays carry the conflict and merging between speech and writing even further. In more and more complex ways, plays like That Time, Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu suggest the drama's capacity to quote non-dramatic language, such as tape-recordings, and written narrative. In each case, the effect of the repetition is to set up discrepancies between the drama and the narratives that it encloses. The voices in That Time belong to the listening face only in the limited sense in which Krapp's earlier voice still belongs to him; the voice in Rockaby seems to speak of and to the woman, but its repetitions establish an irreducible and continually-renewed split between voice and image; and the narrative in Ohio Impromptu quotes, and is quoted by the dramatic situation in a structure of repetition which can never ‘grow to be as one’. In all these cases, the desperate desire to ‘be again’, to reappropriate being in living speech, depends upon repetition, even as it is repetition which endlessly estranges being from speech.

WHAT? WHERE?

To replace speech by writing, and thereby to challenge the prestige of dramatic speech, as Beckett's theatre does, is also to challenge one of the most powerful and recurrent oppositions between drama and writing—that opposition between the living, the embodied, the concrete on the one hand, and the abstract, the symbolic and the immaterial on the other. The two alleged characteristics of drama, its phonic immediacy and its physicality, are closely connected, of course, for the critical ascendancy of voice in the theatre derives from and is reinforced by the sense of the origin of the voice in the body. If the language of the written book is distant and immaterial, then the language of the performed drama is conceived to be intimately alive because it is physical.

As many have observed, Beckett's theatre displays a deep and continuous concentration on the physical in all its senses.¹³ In its rigorous attention to spacing, movement and position, Beckett's theatre seems to emphasise the irreducible physicality of human bodies in the spaces they actually inhabit. For Beckett's characters, the stage has its own tangible presence, usually in the sense of a limit or boundary, as, most especially, in Act without Words I, where the function of the offstage area is to stress that there is no other place permitted for the actor than the stage. What is more, the limits of this available area in Beckett's theatre have tended to shrink remorselessly. Whereas, in Waiting for Godot the two tramps range vigorously over the whole stage and even leave it from time to time, in Endgame, only one character can move around freely, thus turning the large empty space around the characters from a functional, habitable space into a space of ironic unavailability. Though Krapp has the run of the stage and of a small offstage area, the action is effectively concentrated in the pool of light in the centre; in an important way, Krapp is only a character for the audience when he is in this restricted area of light. From this play onwards, characters are restricted to smaller and smaller spaces, either by lighting, as with the reduced area provided in Footfalls, or the spotlight on the face in That Time and on the mouth in Not I, or by physical restraint, as with Winnie in Happy Days, or the speakers in Play. It is as though Beckett were seeking to narrow the stage around the bodies of his actors and to abolish the difference between them, in a version of that process described in All Strange Away, in which the narrator progressively collapses the cube to eliminate the empty space opened up by a change in position.¹⁴ The claustrophobic narrowing of the stage space is also to be found enacted in an unpublished fragment called ‘Mongrel Mime’, which, apparently, requires the passage of an actor from right to left over the stage through three progressively smaller chambers.¹⁵ One of the advantages of writing for television for Beckett is that it provides a mobile frame, allowing, in Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, … but the clouds … and the television version of Not I, the exploitation of the constricting effects of close-up.

All this might seem to evidence an attention to stage space which is self-reflexive, in an affirmation of the limited autonomy of the theatre similar to that by Artaud. But to make this kind of affirmation is to ignore the resistant difference within self-reflection. Even if it represents itself alone, the stage is still an imaginary place, which is different from the ‘actual’ stage known during the day by cleaners, scene-shifters and rehearsing actors. The stage affirms itself as elementary and irreducible space, by representing itself as such. Beckett's theatre, for all its simplicity and directness with regard to stage space, time and again shows us actual space repeating itself in this way, or moving from the simplicity of the concrete into the complex condition of the represented. Pozzo, enquiring of Vladimir and Estragon whether they are in ‘the place known as the Board’ learns that the place is not quite ‘like nothing,’ because it has a tree in it, so concludes, ‘Then it's not the Board’ (CDW, 80).

Perhaps the play which gives the strongest sense of self-sufficient location in Beckett's work is Endgame. Hugh Kenner, answering his own ‘where is this place?’ declares, ‘it is here, that is all we can say, here before us, on stage. The set does not represent, the set is itself.’¹⁶ Beryl and John Fletcher similarly affirm the play's freedom from repetition, saying that the stage has ‘a particular reality. It is not a facsimile of a middle-class living room … but a place in its own right.’¹⁷ But this is to underestimate the complexity of what happens to conventional expectations of theatrical space during the course of this play. Normally, in a play that insists on the unity of place, we are given a sense of accessory or contingent spaces, extending outside and adjacent to what we see before us on stage. In fact, we gain our sense of the solidity of the stage space by reference to this imagined context. Endgame makes it difficult for the audience to place its stage space within these imaginary coordinates. Sometimes, as when Hamm declares, ‘Outside of here it's death’, or when Clov announces that all he can see out of the window is ‘Zero’, it may seem that this contracted space is the whole world. But at other times, we are given the opposite impression, that this space is a sort of non-locality, a provisional or hypothetical space where time is absent, or never gets going; to borrow the paradoxical notion of Worstward Ho, it might be a ‘grot in the void’, a fold of imaginary space within vacancy itself.¹⁸ If this is so, then the stage space might seem less ‘real’ even than the reduced exterior that Clov sees, or imagines he sees. Nor should we forget Clov's kitchen. Is this part of the stage space, part of the surrounding ‘zero’, or some intermediate zone, perhaps even some other stage somewhere? Endgame asks us to conceive of a place which is both absolute and relative. The stage space both is and isn't its own space.

On top of this, our experience of the limiting space of the play is made ambiguous by Hamm's blind experience of it. Hamm's blindness seems to induce in him the vertigo of placelessness, for he feels surrounded by ‘infinite emptiness … like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe’ (CDW, 109-10). He tries to counteract this sensation by having Clov move him round the walls and back to the centre of the stage, but in neither place does he seem to achieve the sense of full occupancy. Sitting at the centre, he feels the need to confirm the limiting circumference of the room at the wall. Once at the wall, the feeling of eccentricity to himself overtakes him and he makes Clov hurry him back to the centre of his world—but, once there, is unable to content himself that he really is at the centre. He seems to be suffering from a version of the anxiety suffered by Watt at the sight of the disjoined centre and circumference. Hamm presumably wishes to be at the centre because that is the place of least movement, and the defining place of stability. But his blindness means that the centre is likely to become detached in his mind from its circumference—for, obviously, a centre can only function as such when the circle of which it is the centre is also perceived, or structurally present in it. This means that, far from abolishing or negating the circumference, the centre continually requires or internally repeats the circumference. Considered as a structural necessity as well as a perceptual function, this is as true for a sighted person as for a blind one.

Hamm's centripetal movement inwards is therefore likely to be converted at any moment to a centrifugal movement outwards to his own periphery and vice versa. What makes this more complex is that where a circumference only has one centre, a given centre has an infinite number of possible circumferences. Hamm seems to enact this on his return to the centre:

I feel a little too far to the left. [Clov moves chair slightly.] Now I feel a little too far to the right. [Clov moves chair slightly.] I feel a little too far forward. [Clov moves chair slightly.] I feel a little too far back. [Clov moves chair slightly.]

(CDW, 105)

His obsessive attempts to stabilise himself actually mark out the beginnings of another circle, as any attempt to find a centre must.¹⁹ Hamm can never be in the place where movement is cancelled out, for the movement between centre and circle is continual and repeated.

In a recent play which is devoted entirely to movement, Quad I and II, a similar compulsion to oscillate between centre and periphery is found. Each of the four hooded players tramps in a series of triangles down two sides of a square and diagonally across the centre—though without actually touching the centre. As with Hamm in Endgame, the movement round the edge of the square seems to require or bring about a deviation into the middle, and the approach to the middle seems to project the players back out again to the edge. This seems to be a refiguring in miniature of the larger oscillation of the players between movement into and movement away from the square. Like comets, they are drawn repeatedly into the gravitational pull of the square, only to be flung off into outer darkness at the end of their courses. As with Hamm, again, the exact centre is never reached, but skirted round in a movement which, when all four players are moving at once, creates an anticlockwise circle inside the square.

Though the square seems to be a simple given—we see it ready for the players to occupy before they enter—it is not long before their movement seems to take over and internalise its shape. But, once absorbed like this, the shape of the square loses its permanence and seems to have to be inscribed and anxiously reinscribed by their movement. It may be that, in this, Beckett is insisting on the specificity of the TV medium, which relies not upon the presence of images before us, but on the retinal persistence of interrupted lines of light which shuttle back and forth across the screen. Just as a still image can only be produced by the rapid, exactly repeated motion of these lines, so the sense of poise and completeness of design in Quad is made up from the repeated movements of the four players. Quad therefore collapses and complicates the relationship of outside and inside. The players arrive in the square, and, moving round it, may seem, like Dante's damned, to be the prisoners of their movement. But, since the movement they describe creates a space, they may be said to be outside it. They are therefore, in different senses, prisoner and jailor, inside and outside and the simple, apparent space of the mime has become a complex space of metaphor, repetition and representation.

A feature of Beckett's theatre which is just as surprising is the giving over of the stage space not to action, but to the preparation preliminary to action, which makes the audience unsure where the ‘real’ action is to take place. This is apparent in What Where, in which the stage space is made into a kind of animated doodle-pad, into which the absent author can project his first thoughts and rewrites. This process is carried even further in A Piece of Monologue, in which the actual stage is given over to the delivery of what sounds like a script for some other play. It is as though the actor were standing on stage describing himself performing a mime: ‘Gropes to window and stares out. … Gropes back in the end to where the lamp is standing. Was standing. When last went out’ (CDW, 425). He also describes the stage on which he stands, in terms which repeat with only small modifications the words that we read in the stage-directions at the beginning of the play: ‘White hair catching light. White gown. White socks. White foot of pallet edge of frame stage left’ (CDW, 428-9). To repeat stage-directions in performance is to enact again the supplanting of voice by text and, at the same time, to dissolve the solidity of the perceived space of the play; this now becomes merely a potential space, which the audience must fill with imaginary action—indeed, we may succeed so well in this that it is hard to believe at the end of the performance that we have not witnessed the actions that we have heard described so often. The stage has been converted from a place where action takes place visibly before us, to a space of text, initiating action which is staged elsewhere, in imagination or memory.

Artaud objected to the status of the stage space as repetition, as a sort of subsidiary emptiness, called into being by, and subordinate to the absent text which projects and controls it; he wanted the space of the stage to be ‘full’ and immediate, not the shadow of some other text or controlling intention. We have seen that Beckett's late theatre pushes in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of closing the gap between text and enacting space, a play like A Piece of Monologue incorporates, even ‘stages’ that gap, so that what is usually thought of as a division between the script and the performance becomes a division displayed within the performance (and therefore within the text, too).²⁰

Of course, this repetitive structure extends beyond simple duality, for every script may be staged in an infinite number of ways, none of them exactly coincidental with the original. This can involve repetitions within repetitions, as when a particular production of a play is adapted for another medium, such as television. Indeed, such a double repetition is made possible in the passages of A Piece of Monologue which allude to terms used in TV and film scripts, such as the description of the grave ‘seen from above’, an image which is ‘held for thirty seconds’ before the instruction ‘fade’ (CDW, 428).

Footfalls similarly accompanies its multiplication of ghostly locations, the room, the church, the supper-table, with a multiplication of implied media. M. suspends her pacing in order to speak to us, of some other ‘tangle of tatters’, in some other place, and then tells the story of old Mrs Winter and her daughter. The language of her narrative mimics written forms ‘Amy—the daughter's given name, as the reader will remember’—and, more disconcertingly, the printed form of the playscript:

Amy: Just what exactly, Mother, did you perhaps fancy it was? … Mrs W: You yourself observed nothing … strange? Amy: No, Mother, I myself did not to put it mildly. Mrs W: What do you mean, Amy, to put it mildly, what can you possibly mean, Amy, to put it mildly?

(CDW, 403)

This capacity for ‘quotation’ of other representational media further erodes the specificity of the stage-performance, so that we cannot be absolutely sure of the appropriate form or medium of the play. It may sit oddly with Beckett's often-quoted strictures about the specificity of medium of his plays, and his attempts to restrain adaptations, but nearly every one of his plays makes important internal gestures towards other media.²¹ In Waiting for Godot, there are hints of other kinds of theatrical context, like the circus and the music hall, in which the play might be staged—though, as we might expect, Beckett resisted Roger Blin's initial idea of making this explicit by turning the theatre into a circus ring.²²All That Fall, which, as we have seen, Beckett thought of as intrinsically a radio play ‘for voices rather than bodies’, is actually the most spatially concrete of radio plays, requiring of the listener or reader a staging in some interior mental space, even as it parodies the conventions which allow the construction of this space. If one had to imagine what a mixture between a radio play and a stage play would be like, however, it would probably be something like Krapp's Last Tape, written shortly after All That Fall, which is a kind of ‘staging’ (as opposed to an adaptation) of a radio play, since it mingles, without attempting to unify, the visibility of bodies on the stage and the placeless voices ‘coming out of the dark’ of the radio play. This may have been anticipated in the use of blind characters in Waiting for Godot and Endgame to unsettle the audience's sense of visible location.

Beckett's later writing for the theatre demands of it technicalities of lighting and staging which suggest video and film—the separation and dismemberment of the body, with isolation of faces and lips, or the effect of hovering and bird's-eye view, and consequent concentration of focus, as well as the separation of voices from bodies, to give the effect of voice-over, as in Footfalls and Rockaby. His writing for TV, on the other hand (though it is difficult to imagine it being staged in quite the same way in any other medium), retains and even highlights many of the features of the stage play—the single unchanging set, for instance, and the restriction of viewpoint.

Not I is a particularly good example of this variability of medium. Even though he had nothing to do with the making of it, Beckett actually at one time preferred the TV version, which dispensed with the figure of the auditor, in favour of a claustrophobically close focus on the mouth. The mouth in the theatre seems magically remote, as though produced in some space of illusion, and may make audiences think of something other than a physical mouth (a member of one audience described the mouth as being like a flickering candle-flame), while the mouth in the TV version is inescapably physical, enforcing a fascinated attention to the violent, erotic struggle of lips, teeth, tongue and spittle. The point is not really which version of the play is better, or more faithful, for the play includes both versions, and in a sense consists in the self-distancing movement across different media which these two versions bring about. The case is analogous to what happens with Beckett's self-translations. The two versions of a text each require the other to complete them, even though the ‘other’ version never does complete the text, but instead introduces complexity or discrepancy.

Beckett has also extended this principle of transferability to his prose work. The close attention to details of space and position in the related texts The Lost Ones, Ping, Imagination Dead Imagineand All Strange Away, as well as the theatrical language often used in these works, suggests a doubling of medium, as though the texts included within themselves the possibility of their staging in some other theatrical form. Indeed, such stagings have taken place, and have sometimes been endorsed by Beckett.²³ One of the most recent prose works, Company, seems to have a particularly dense overlayering of references to and possibilities for staging in other media; the voice which ‘comes to one in the dark’ throughout this text has many of the qualities of the voices ‘coming out of the dark’ of radio drama, while the details of the listener's position remind us remarkably of the listening face of That Time, a stage play that itself uses some of the properties of radio drama. The careful attention in Company to the physical space in which the listener lies, and the division of this space from the imaginary spaces of quotation/remembering suggest the insistent physicality of some of Beckett's late drama, while the use of intercutting and flashback, as well as the close visual attention paid to certain items within the narrative, such as the watch-face, suggest continuities with visual media.

These internal allusions to a plurality of different places for staging make Company typical of Beckett's late writing (and especially his dramatic writing), rather than an exception to it. If it remains true that Beckett's dramatic works assert the specificity of their media, it is because they are placed at the representative edges of those media, rather than at their centres. It is these boundaries which constitute the specificity of the medium, even as they mark the dubious place where they touch and perhaps cross into different media. Beckett's plays mark this tenuous place of difference as the most representative. The simple ‘thereness’ of the plays depends upon their repeatability in other spaces of staging.

In suggesting that presence is never simple but always subject to the possibility or necessity of various kinds of repetition, Beckett's theatre points outside itself, to implicate in this redoubling readers' and audiences' attempts to make sense, to ‘stage’ the plays in the spaces of interpretation. To say this is not to imply an infinite or open range of possibilities for reading. Rather it is to induce a self-reflexive sense of the often invisible limits of reading and interpretation, a sense of the conventions which regulate and are occasionally resisted by criticism. In other words, the staging of Beckett's work in interpretation involves issues of power, and this staging has a particular significance because of the uniquely prestigious place that he occupies in literary culture; no other living author can claim Beckett's near-mythological status. For this reason, Beckett's texts, theatrical and otherwise, and the criticism which constitutes and reproduces them, legitimate power at many levels; the power of beliefs about the integrity and authority of the artist, beliefs in the place and function of theatre and, indeed, of high culture itself. These connect with institutional structures of power, maintaining the special place of the discipline of English within universities and within society as a whole. At a more general level still, Beckett studies reproduce and confirm a whole range of more general beliefs about the nature and purpose of interpretation, the continuity and singleness of the subject and the nature of the unchangeably human. It is in the affirmation of presence, the belief that Beckett's plays give us something positive and self-identical, in a positive and identifiable place, which underpins these affirmations. Ruby Cohn's open declaration of the universal value of Beckett's work makes it plain how, for criticism, to ‘say where’ is closely bound up with being able to ‘say what’: ‘Beckett's play lies in the precision of its wide human embrace. In Vladimir's sentence: “But at this place, at this moment, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”’²⁴

This is not to argue that Beckett studies are monolithic and without contradiction. In fact, the contradictions within Beckett criticism, as within most kinds of cultural criticism, are often massive and fundamental. The most obvious of these contradictions is in the way that Beckett criticism attempts to control and to make knowable and readable texts that acknowledgedly undo the bases on which such knowability and readability rests. It is not so much that criticism is here being simply unfaithful to the texts it constitutes—although criticism based on the need to affirm origin and presence is usually blind to most of the features of Beckett's texts which resist these metaphysical absolutes—as that criticism remains unaware of its own deep implication in the production and staging of those texts as knowledge. If questions of cultural politics may seem to some to be particularly inappropriate for Beckett's texts, then this is a measure of the power of the protocol which excludes or invalidates them. The point of such contradictions is usually that they should remain structurally invisible. They are unlikely to become visible, unless criticism is prepared to stage itself with the same degree of analytic self-reflexiveness as do Beckett's texts and plays.

Notes

1. ‘Moody Man of Letters’, New York Times, Sunday, 6 May 1956, sect. 2, p. 3.

2. The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 230.

3. Quoted in Michael Haerdter, Materialen zu Becketts Endspiel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 88.

4. Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage,’ in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965) pp. 119-26.

5. ‘Beckett's Actor’, Modern Drama, 26:4 (December 1983), p. 420.

6. Sidney Homan, Beckett's Theaters: Interpretations for Performance (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), p. 49.

7. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 109.

8. Antonin Artaud, ‘On the Balinese Theatre,’ The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), p. 43. My account of Artaud's writings on the theatre and of critical attitudes towards Beckett's theatre depends heavily on Jacques Derrida's discussions of Artaud in ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ and ‘La Parole Soufflée’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). The relationship between Beckett's and Artaud's work has been discussed in Maurice Blackman, ‘Acting Without Words: Artaud and Beckett's Theatrical Language,’ in Journal of Australian Universities' Modern Language Association, 55 (1981), pp. 68-76.

9. Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett's Theater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980), pp. 27-33; Enoch Brater, ‘Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Rockaby,’ Modern Drama, 25:3 (September 1982), p. 345.

10. Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 217. All references hereafter in text to CDW.

11. La Dernière Bande (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1959), p. 13. One can compare the page-turning in Krapp's Last Tape with the similar suspension of the action to turn the page in Ohio Impromptu (CDW, 446).

12. Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature, Event, Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 320.

13. See, for example, Pierre Chabert's ‘The Body in Beckett's Theatre’, in Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 8 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 23-28 and the discussion of theatrical location in the chapter ‘At This Place’ in Cohn, Just Play, pp. 17-33.

14. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980 (London: John Calder, 1984) pp. 123-4.

15. ‘Mongrel Mime for One Old Small’ is the heading for this sketch of a play, abandoned in 1983 and held in the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.

16. Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), p. 121.

17. Beryl S. and John Fletcher, A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 93.

18. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 16.

19. The shape described is also that of a cross, a shape which recurs in Beckett's theatre and staging; see the discussions of cruciform movements in Cohn, Just Play, p. 32 and Martha Fehsenfeld, ‘Beckett's Late Works: An Appraisal,’ in Modern Drama, 25:3 (September 1982), p. 358. The cross shares with the circle a structural interdependence between centre and periphery.

20. Pierre Chabert draws explicitly on Artaud's work when he argues for the absolute identity between text and production which comes about when Beckett directs his own plays: ‘Beckett as author and director is one and the same person. … The mise-en-scène, depending as it does on a change in status between speech and space no longer constitutes an activity secondary to that of writing. It is the act of translation, illustration, derivation of which Artaud spoke’, ‘Beckett as Director’, trans. M. A. Bonney and J. Knowlson, in Krapp's Last Tape: Theatre Workbook, ed. J. Knowlson (London: Brutus, 1980), p. 86.

21. Writing to Barney Rosset about a proposed stage-adaptation of All That Fall, for example, Beckett protested that the play was ‘a specifically radio play’ whose quality ‘depends upon the whole thing's coming out of the dark’. Later in the letter, Beckett's general adherence to the principle of the specificity of medium is made clear: ‘If we can't keep our genres distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down’ (quoted by Claus Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A. Humaniora, Vol. 51 [Abo, Finland, 1976], p. 3).

22. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Pan Books, 1980), p. 342.

23. See the chapter ‘Jumping Beckett's Genres’, in Cohn's Just Play, pp. 207-29 for details of transpositions of Beckett's works from one medium to another.

24. Cohn, Just Play, p. 14.

Acknowledgement: Steven Connor's contribution to this volume appears by kind permission of Blackwell. It was first published in Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, 1988.